In 2002, our son Tim celebrated his 16th birthday with a party at our property. He invited his school friends, including a German exchange student. I asked her if she had ever come across the German magazine to which I contributed stories and photos. She said she had, and I showed her some of the issues that included my work. She recognised one of the covers and said she had that issue at home.
My story in that edition was about one of Tim’s friends, whose summer job was playing the guitar in the forest at the Tree Top Walk. She was blown away when I told her that the fellow in the photos was outside right now at the campfire. She had come halfway around the world to connect by chance with a real person behind her English language lessons back in Germany.
The photo above was one of several to illustrate the story. You can see the beginning of the influence of digital operations. So far, all of the photos in this series (except the black and white photos back near the beginning) have been presented at the proportions of the slide or print that they came from. This photo is the scan that was sent to the magazine and the image has been cropped to emphasise the height of the trees behind the subject or to cut out distracting objects. It doesn’t transform it into a great photo, but it shows the beginning of the new possibilities that emerged with digital, even though the photo was taken on film.
I had long been frustrated by the constraints of the slide and print formats. I had given up processing black and white film years before, but I missed the freedom that I had once enjoyed to crop and manipulate black and white photos. As I handled slides and colour prints, there were times when I would see the better photo that was waiting within the frame, just needing a bit of cropping to make it shine through.
Next: End of an era